How sad for your husband! That's one thing I can say...I got to do a LOT of extra curriculars. Part of the nice thing about small towns...our school was small enough that they didn't need to make cuts for teams and activities, so you could do pretty much any activity you wanted, even if you were terrible at it. (I made a GREAT bench warmer in junior high basketball!) You may not get much playing time, but you were "part of the team".
The thing with my mom....my parents were a lot older when they got married and thus older when they had children. They both grew up post Great Depression/pre WWII, so they were from an Era in which the man was the head of the house. My parents' marriage was not a happy one and they divorced when I was just barely 6 years old, my brother was 7. My brother is a lot like my mom in personality, and I was more like my dad, who she had no good word to say about. I think she kind of looked at my brother as the man of the house after she and dad divorced, and she tried so hard to squash out my dad's influence. When I had just graduated high school, I had gotten a summer job and my mom wasn't happy with the hours I was getting and demanded I go to my boss to get more hours. That wasn't me....it was only a summer job, I had applied at like 50 places and hadn't gotten so much as an interview....I couldn't afford to be picky, and I knew there were 30 kids waiting for the job I got. If I went in making demands, I was likely to get fired and they'd replace me in 5 minutes. I got to work the next day and my boss called me in because my mother had called her and demanded that she give me more hours. I was FURIOUS that she had interfered. When I explained to my boss that it was my MOTHER who was unhappy, not me, and I was obviously horrified at mom's behavior, the boss told me that her plan when I came in that morning was to let me go, but since it was not my fault and she didn't want to get me in trouble, she would see what she could do. Anyway, when I got home that night, I was so angry and told my mom she had NO right to interfere with my EMPLOYER, I was a legal adult, and she may not agree with every decision that I made, but it was MINE to make. And she told me I was stupid for not handling it her way, and I told her she almost got me fired, and things escalated and I finally told her point blank "Mom, I am not just like you. I will not always do things exactly the way you would because I am a different person...I'm not you!" And later, when she again called me stupid, I told her how much that hurt, to have your mom call you stupid, and she said to me "Well do you know how much it hurts to hear you say you're not just like me? That is the worst thing you have ever said to me in your life!"
So I think she looked at my brother and was relieved that he wasn't like my dad, looked at me and was horrified that I was. And that combined with my brother being a boy, when she was from an era where boys were considered quite a bit more important than girls, it didn't occur to her that it was wrong to favor him. I asked her once why she had different rules for him because he walked out of the house 5 minutes before I tried to...he was allowed to go out, and I wasn't. Her answer was "He's a boy. He can't get into as much as a girl." He, as a boy, would not be responsible for anything that happened...I, as a girl, had to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. And because he was not like my dad, she trusted his judgment infinitely more than she trusted mine. Everything was always my fault. He scratched a car pulling out of the parking lot at school...it was my fault because I should have made him go in and find the owner. He came out....it was my fault he is gay because I wasn't there for him enough in college and he had to go find other friends and these were the people who accepted him. She could not bear to think of him as less than perfect, so she always had to find a way to make things my fault or to give him what he wanted. When I achieved something, I wasn't allowed to say anything about it because it might make him feel bad because "he's used to being better" than me. He was the oldest, he was a boy, and she couldn't stand my dad. That combination just made it hard for her to see clearly. He was the golden child and I was the one who reminded her of the person she couldn't stand, but she couldn't "divorce" me like she did my dad.
I am so terrified that I'm inadvertantly doing this to my children because I don't always understand DS's behavior. I don't ever want him to feel like I don't love him as much because he's different. But I also don't want DD to feel like we always give him his way because of his Autism. Sometimes we have to handle things differently with him because what worked with DD doesn't work with him, and I am afraid she's going to feel like we favor him because we were more strict with her. Mistakes we made with her, we have learned from, and don't make them with DS, but I could see how she could see it as us just having different rules for her, which would be unfair.
Sorry, that was really long...but I hope that explains it. I don't think she did any of it to be mean....she just didn't realize she was playing favorites.
